Inmate Convicted of Triple Murder in Small Texas Town Set for Execution

The Texas Tribune

HUNTSVILLE, TX — LeJames Norman, one of two men sentenced to death for killing three people in a robbery, is scheduled to be executed Wednesday barring a final reprieve from the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 2005, Norman and Ker’sean Olajuwa Ramey broke into a neighbor’s home in Edna — a small town located between Corpus Christi and Houston — intending to steal cocaine, according to court records. The two then got into an altercation with the occupants of the home and killed Celso Lopez, Tiffani Peacock and Sam Roberts. While Norman initially fled to Mexico after the killings, he was apprehended by Border Patrol when he re-entered the country and subsequently cooperated with police, including by testifying at Ramey’s trial.

Norman pleaded guilty in his trial in 2008 and was sentenced to death. In the years since, he has filed several appeals through state and federal courts arguing that there were issues with how his trial was conducted. In his most recent petition, filed to the Supreme Court on Monday, Norman argued that prosecutors misrepresented facts between his and Ramey’s trial to make Norman seem more culpable for the killings.

Norman also sued the state in August alongside John Rubio, another death row inmate with an execution scheduled for November, asking a Travis County district judge to block Texas’ use of pentobarbital, the drug it uses for lethal injections. The suit argued that Texas’ supply of the drug was either expired or created through unreliable means at third-party compounding facilities. 

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice has tested its supply of pentobarbital for potency and will extend its use date if they determine it will work effectively, a process critics have called unreliable and unsafe. A Travis County district judge temporarily barred use of the drug before the 2023 execution of Robert Fratta over concerns about the practice, but that ruling was overturned by Texas’ Court of Criminal Appeals and Fratta was executed.

The CCA blocked the judge in Norman and Rubio’s case from stalling their executions on Friday after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a request with the appellate court asking it to do so. Paxton argued the lower court lacked jurisdiction to block criminal proceedings through a civil suit.

If carried out, Norman would be the fifth man put to death by Texas this year and the first since the state passed 600 executions in the modern era. 

Ramey’s execution is scheduled one week after Norman’s, on Sept. 23. Three more executions are scheduled through the rest of 2026, and if carried out would mark the most executions in Texas in a single year this decade.